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TateShots: Simone Rocha

13 September 2012

Simone Rocha is part of a new generation of British fashion designers who take inspiration from modern art.

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About

In celebration of London Fashion Week 2012, we visit the designer in her East End studio to hear how the artist Louise Bourgeois has influenced her collections. From concepts through to fabric and textile choices, Rocha talks us through some of her key pieces and how she relates to Bourgeois’s life and work.

Transcription

Roche:A thing should have a body and it should have a soul, you know, even if it’s just a T-shirt.

My mother is a muse of mine. We actually work together. She introduced me to the work of Louise Bourgeois, and I kind of ran with this. I can’t seem to step away from it, maybe because it’s a mother figure as well, and her work is so influenced by her family, which my work is too.

LB:There were three personnages – the father, the mother and the child. I’m the child.

Roche:Okay, you’re the child.

LB:So we are not going to be separated.

Roche:So this was one of my very first pieces, around six years ago, and it was really influenced by The Spiders, the sculpture, my mum – that was a huge influence on me because of spiders and weaving, so I did a lot of hand crochet and worked that into dresses.

What I really love about her work is the textile element and the tactile element, and how it’s so obviously related to her as a subject.

LB:Art is a guarantee of sanity, right? Art is a guarantee of sanity. If you are an artist, you are not going to go cuckoo; you are an artist. You are cuckoo already – let’s forget about that!

Roche:To see art which was so influenced by fabrication is what really made me interested. You know, so whether it’s on the body, or whether…you know, the way she used her personal hanging garments inside the metal cages, like her Cell series – and I really thought that was really exciting, because I think it gave clothes and fashion real content.

This drawing, Blue Dress, from 1998, the skeleton is exposed inside; and that kind of exposing goes through all my work. Instead of obviously exposing the bones, I expose the interiors of the garments, so things like tailoring, or the canvas traditionally inside pieces, can all be seen, and like trapping the lace within the plastic – but it’s that whole feeling of trapment and bound … body. You know all that.

LB:I transform nasty work into good work. I transform hate into love. That’s what makes me tick.

Roche:For me personally, art has always been relevant in fashion. I am a designer, you know, rather than an artist, because what I do is, I make clothes, inevitably for people to wear, but my theory is, I would like it to look as beautiful on a hanger on a wall as it would on a body.